Yehoram Gaon

Yehoram Gaon is an Israeli singer and actor, one of the best-known voices of Hebrew popular song, and a singer who has kept the Ladino songs of the Sephardic Jews alive. He is on Muzika-Balkan under Bosnia because of his father: the historian and Ladino scholar Moshe David Gaon was born in 1889 in Travnik, in Bosnia, into a Sephardic Jewish family descended from the exiles from Spain.

Yehoram was born on 28 December 1939 in the Beit HaKerem quarter of Jerusalem; his mother, Sara Hakim, was of Turkish descent. His father had studied in Vienna before settling in Jerusalem towards the end of the First World War, and he worked there as a teacher and journalist and as general secretary of the Sephardi community council until his death in 1958. Yehoram has spent his life in Israel: Hebrew Wikipedia notes that he left Jerusalem as a young man and lived in Ramat Gan and later in Ramat HaSharon.

He began in the early 1960s in vocal groups, from 1960 to 1963 with HaTarnegolim (The Roosters) and then with the Yarkon Bridge Trio, which he left in 1965. His breakthrough came in 1966 with the stage musical Kazablan, produced by Giora Godik, which ran for more than 600 performances; in 1973 he played the same role in the film version, the part he is best known for, and its songs "Kol hakavod" and "Yesh makom" have stayed with him. In 1971 he starred in the autobiographical film Ani Yerushalmi, with songs such as "Hineni kan".

Many of his best-loved songs are love songs. "Eifo at ahuva", on a 1969 album, is Telma Eligon-Rose's Hebrew version of a Spanish-language song by Leonardo Favio; "Rosa", from his 1971 solo programme, has words by Haim Hefer and music by Dubi Zeltzer; and Naomi Shemer's "Od lo ahavti dai" was the title song of his 1977 album. Earlier came "Kol ha'ir merakelet aleinu" (1965), and later "Itach u'vil'adayich" (1983), "Ba'pardes leyad hashoket" (1984) and the 1988 duet "Adam acher" with Yardena Arazi.

His father's language runs through his work. In 1969 he released an album of romances in Ladino, followed in the 1970s by Ladino collections of Passover songs and Sabbath hymns. With his brother Benny he founded the Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Studies at Ben-Gurion University, and he edited Spices from Spain, a collection of Ladino proverbs with Hebrew translations.

He won the Kinor David prize in 1963 and 1964 and in 2004 received the Israel Prize for his contribution to Hebrew song. He also acted in Krovim Krovim, the first Israeli sitcom, hosted the weekly radio programme Gaon on the Radio from 1997, and published his autobiography in 2017. He is still recording: his channel has new duets from 2025 and 2026 with Gusto, Telma Eligon-Rose and Tomer Hadadi. The playlist here is the collection of his love songs, with "Eifo at ahuva", "Rosa", "Od lo ahavti dai" and "Ba'pardes leyad hashoket".